Prof. George Hewitt
is
a leading scholar of Abkhazian and Georgian languages and
culture, and author of: Georgian, a Structural Reference Grammar
(John Benjamin, 1995), and A Georgian Reader (SOAS, 1996);
Hewitt is also a contributor to OpenDemocracy.net. Some of his
other works include ‘Peoples of the Caucasus’ (in F.
Fernández-Armesto, ed. Guide to the Peoples of Europe (Times
Books, 1994)); and The Abkhazians, a handbook (as author &
editor, Curzon Press, 1999).
The views expressed in this interview do not represent the views
of the Editors of CRIA

Conducted by
Jesse Tatum

CRIA: In light of a tumultuous past—but with a view to the
immediate future—would
you give your thoughts on national reconciliation between
Tbilisi, Sukhum and Tskhinval (and other parts of Georgia),
and how progress might be best achieved?

Hewitt: Sukhum and
Tskhinval as metonyms for the Abkhazians and (South)
Ossetians respectively, would strenuously object to the
implication that Abkhazia and South Ossetia represent
“parts” of a Georgia wherein they could be parties to any
“national” reconciliation.

Tbilisi has had
no say in South Ossetian affairs since the war instigated
there by Georgia’s first post-communist leader, the late
Zviad Gamsakhurdia, ended with the Dagomys Agreement in June
1992, just as it has had no say in Abkhazian affairs since
the war imposed on the republic by Eduard Shevardnadze on 14th
August 1992 ended with the expulsion of Georgian forces at
the end of September 1993. Georgia, thus, effectively lost
‘de facto’ control over these one-time autonomous entities
in 1992/3 — South Ossetia became an Autonomous District
within Georgia in 1922, whilst Abkhazia was downgraded by
Stalin from being a full republic with treaty-ties to
Georgia to become a mere Autonomous Republic within
Georgia in 1931. After the events of August 2008 there can
be no realistic prospect of their reintegration within
Georgia.

Even if one
accepts the definition followed in Georgia since circa 1930
as to who is correctly categorisable as a “Georgian”,
“Georgians” constituted only around 71% of Georgia’s
population in 1989, when the last Soviet census was taken.
Even with Abkhazia and South Ossetia out of the equation,
there are still potential ethno-territorial problems within
Georgia proper. In July 1989 fatal clashes occurred not only
in Abkhazia but also in the southern Dmanisi-Marneuli
region, which is heavily populated by Azerbaijanis, whose
high levels of fertility were openly described in
objectionable articles in Georgia as a threat to country’s
demography.

Georgia’s
state-relations with Azerbaijan have been good in recent years;
in part no doubt as a result of the decision to export Caspian
oil and gas through pipelines that cross Georgian territory, but
one should not ignore the reports of problems on the ground in
Azerbaijani-populated areas of Georgia, leading in recent years
to an outflow of Azerbaijanis from the republic. As for the
Armenians, Georgians and Armenians have been rivals in many
spheres for centuries, and the predominantly Armenian-populated
district of Dzhavakheti in south-western Georgia looks more to
Yerevan than to Tbilisi: Armenian is spoken, and the Armenian
flag is flown. Tbilisi’s insistence on the closure of a Russian
military base in Dzhavakheti has caused local unemployment to
rise. Armenia does not want a dispute with another neighbour
(sc. in addition to its disputes with Azerbaijan and Turkey),
but Dzhavakheti could easily prove another flashpoint for
Georgia. For some years Armenians in the region itself have
accused the Georgian authorities of ignoring their needs;
attempts to take over Armenian churches and graveyards have been
seen as an extension of the policy to “georgianize”
non-Georgians that started on the eve of the collapse of the
former USSR with the move to introduce a language law in 1988
that would have denied access to higher education in Georgia to
anyone unable to pass a test in Georgian language and literature
— Georgian was/is not widely known amongst Armenians and
Azerbaijanis outside the capital (and in Abkhazia in general).

Given the
demographics, federalisation was the obvious way to restructure
the state when Georgia gained the opportunity to control its own
affairs. Instead, the dangerous flames of nationalism were
fanned, which antagonised many/most of the ethnic minorities
living within the country’s Soviet borders. Had the sensible
course been followed, one could hypothesise that the S. Ossetian
and Abkhazian conflicts (not to mention the civil war that was
conducted in Gamsakhurdia’s home-region of Mingrelia following
his ousting in January 1992) might have been avoided with the
result that Georgia might have proceeded to peaceful and
prosperous independence with no shrinkage of borders.

However pointless it
is to engage in speculation about how different history would
have been with more sensible politics being followed in late-
and post-Soviet Tbilisi, federalisation remains the best way for
Georgia to avoid outbreaks of further internal disputes.

CRIA: How does
Tbilisi re-earn the trust of these regions? How would the
Abkhazian and South Ossetian leadership promote the return of
displaced refugees (IDPs) and rights for ethnic Georgians and
the other minorities in the areas?

Hewitt: If Georgia were
prepared to accept federalisation and also to reverse the denial
of language-rights for example to Mingrelians, such a
demonstration of equitable treatment for those living within
Georgia proper might persuade Sukhum and Tskhinval that
Georgia’s yearning for regional “overlordship” no longer
presented a danger. Most of the refugees from S. Ossetia
following the events of August 2008 are ethnic Georgians, whilst
most of those who fled from Abkhazia after Georgia’s defeat in
1993 were ethnic Mingrelians (and local residents who abandoned
their homes when Georgian military personnel were finally
ejected from Abkhazia’s Upper K’odor Valley on 12th
August 2008 were mainly ethnic Svans).

Emotions are
undoubtedly still too raw to envisage an imminent return of
Georgians to S. Ossetia; the Abkhazians have raised no
objections to Mingrelians staying in, or returning to, the
south-easternmost province of Gal, where, whatever the
(disputed) ethnic origins of these locals, there had been a
preponderance of Mingrelian-speakers for decades, and Svans who
did not take up arms against Abkhazians during the war or
thereafter are free to live in their homesteads in the K’odor
Valley. Sadly for the refugees themselves, failure on the part
of the Georgian authorities to recognise the post-1992/3
realities and to pretend that re-establishing control over the
lost territories and a mass-return of the refugees have been
ever imminent has only resulted in extra misery for the people
concerned, for whom no adequate housing has been built or found
despite the fact that large numbers have migrated out of Georgia
since independence, presumably vacating many domiciles into
which refugees could easily have been moved.

With particular
reference to Abkhazia, the exiles in whose repatriation the
Abkhazians are most interested are the descendants of those
Abkhazians who migrated to the Ottoman Empire at the end of the
great Caucasian War (1864) or following the Russo-Turkish war of
1877/8, a population-shift which denuded Abkhazia of its native
inhabitants and created the opportunity for the start of
large-scale inward Mingrelian migration, something which became
state-policy under Stalin’s anti-Abkhazian campaign from the
late 1930s and which had such a disastrous consequence for the
republic’s ethnic balance, Abkhazians forming only 17.8% of
Abkhazia’s population by 1989.

As regards the
denizens of the Gal District who view themselves as Mingrelians/Georgians,
the question of citizenship is certainly problematic. Any dual
Abkhazian-Georgian citizenship is, for obvious reasons, out of
the question.

CRIA: How widely
spoken are Mingrelian, Laz and Svan in (and outside) Georgia?
And how far apart are groups of speakers in geographic terms?

Hewitt: Georgian, Mingrelian,
Laz and Svan are the four members of the South Caucasian (or
Kartvelian) language-family. This family cannot be demonstrated
to be related to any other language or language-family spoken
today or at any time in the past. The compact area in which
these languages are spoken is concentrated on Georgia (proper)
and extends into eastern parts of modern-day Turkey, where the
bulk of the Laz are to be found. Within Georgia, because of
census-practices since circa 1930, no-one knows how many
Mingrelians or Svans there are or, amongst each of those ethnic
groups, how widespread is the knowledge of Mingrelian and Svan —
there are only negligible numbers of Laz in Georgia. It is
anecdotally believed that there are perhaps 50,000+ speakers of
Svan, whilst half a million would be the maximum for speakers of
Mingrelian, though the number of ethnic Mingrelians would exceed
this. Since there were no Russian-language schools in Svanetia,
all Svans brought up in Svanetia will have been educated through
the medium of Georgian, learning and speaking Svan at home. As
there were Russian-language schools during Soviet times in
Mingrelia, it can be concluded that not all Mingrelians will
necessarily be fluent in Georgian, though most probably are;
however, by no means all ethnic Mingrelians know Mingrelian, as
many were brought up in a purely Georgian-speaking environment.
Over many years Georgian has been extending its range westwards
at the expense of Mingrelian, whilst Mingrelian extended its
range westward at the expense of Abkhaz, but that process has
now ended. Laz, given the geographical position of its speakers
(along the east Turkish coast from the Soviet/Georgian border as
far as Rize), has been influenced by both Greek and Turkish. The
number of Laz speakers is unknown, estimates ranging between
100,000 and a quarter of a million. As with both the closely
related Mingrelian and Svan within Georgia, the language has not
been taught or officially encouraged. Only between Laz and
Mingrelian is there any degree of mutual intelligibility.

CRIA: What are some links between
language, identity and citizenship in modern Georgia?

Hewitt: Since Mingrelian,
Svan and Laz were not regarded as official languages from c.1930,
it has been impossible to see in census-returns the level of
their retention as 1st or 2nd languages of
the local populations. As Mingrelians, Svans, Laz and, most
ridiculously of all, the North Central Caucasian speaking Bats
community, which lives in the one east Georgian village of Zemo
Alvani, have been classified as ‘Georgians’, it is extremely
difficult to answer such questions as how they identify
themselves in their own minds and how important they feel
preservation of their mother-tongue to be. The Bats (their
language being related to Chechen and Ingush) are reported no
longer to be teaching their language to their children, and this
language has been heavily influenced by Georgian for almost two
centuries at least. Whilst most Svan lived secluded in the
highlands of Svanetia, their language (with a bewildering
variety of local variations) was pretty secure. But after a
disastrous winter at the end of the 1980s, many were relocated
from Upper Svanetia to lowlands in west Georgia, in some cases
to villages where non-Georgians lived in the expectation that a
Svan presence would georgianise [sic] them! The extent to
which Svan can be preserved as populations move out of the
mountains must be open to doubt. Back in the days of
glasnost’ some Mingrelians living in Abkhazia voiced their
concerns at the way their language/culture was ignored for the
greater good of Georgian, and the backlash that such talk
occasioned was not confined to verbal assaults. The issue of
language-rights for Mingrelian has for some time been and still
remains a very sensitive issue, as Georgian authorities seem
incapable of distinguishing between language-rights and
political rights, fearing that granting the former would lead to
separatist-demands for Mingrelia. This is indeed a possible, but
by no means inevitable, corollary, and my suggestion for
meaningful restructuring of the state along federal lines is in
part meant to avoid such a consequence. However, because of the
situation that has evolved since c.1930 the fascinating
question of the link between language, identity and citizenship
with reference to the Mingrelians, who are the largest of the
minorities living within Georgia, plainly cannot be easily
answered.

CRIA: You’ve met and worked with
the last speaker of Ubykh Tevfik Esenc, who passed away in 1992.
Can you summarise what this experience meant to you and any
subsequent implications?

Hewitt: I had the immense
privilege of meeting Tevfik Esenç in Istanbul in 1974 and of
making recordings with him over the course of one week that
summer. Travelling, courtesy of the British Council, to Tbilisi
the following year to spend the academic year 1975-76 learning
Georgian and gaining a familiarity with Abkhaz, Avar and Chechen
(plus Mingrelian and Svan), I realised just how precarious was
the future for several of the other indigenous languages of the
Caucasus, which had by then become my area of specialisation. I
determined that I had to do whatever I could to try to prevent
any other such language following Ubykh to the grave. It was
with this thought in mind that I decided to make a statement on
the developing conflict between Georgians and Abkhazians as
nationalism, directed against a number of local minorities,
which began to explode in Georgia from late 1988. It seemed to
me that the opinions being expressed in Georgian papers to which
I had access in England could lead to a dangerous situation. I
had hoped to persuade any open-minded reader who was prepared to
read the Open Letter that I submitted in Georgian to the weekly
‘Literary Georgia’ in the summer of 1989 that the nationalism
being championed by those leading the struggle to rid Georgia of
communist rule could lead to disaster not only for the
Abkhazians but also for the future of the Georgian state itself.
The attempt signally failed …